Robot 6

Strangeways: Murder Moon – Page 09

This one doesn’t read so well all by itself, it seems. But then I think that having to deliver one page at a time isn’t the best way to tell stories. However, if I dropped a chapter at a time, I bet it’d slip through the cracks. This one of the parts of this whole webcomics thing that I don’t really like. I guess people can group up pages if they really want to.

Okay, enough digressing. The content’s free, right? That’s the really important thing. It keeps you from going back to work for a minute or so.

But in reality, I probably should have found a way to combine this page and the previous page. Not the most egregious error I’ve committed, but doesn’t really do much to enhance things. Here, I was really aiming for some more atmosphere and tension, and it would be a lot more effective in a film presentation as opposed to comics. I probably could have called out more interesting shots or had a “Hush up a second!” moment with the wolf half-visible. Hindsight is a harsh mistress.

Though I did manage to make it so that Collins handicapped himself a bit further by giving up his pistol and going out there unarmed. That plays out a little bit more on the following page. I’ll also note here that the last panel is really the first instance of Luis going out of his way to do Collins as Clint Eastwood, which I had to discourage. Blondie, aka the Man With No Name does cast a long shadow over modern westerns. And rightfully so. But all the same, I wanted to have Collins be his own man as it were. I’m sure that I still lean a little heavily on that character for shorthand, which I should probably be more aware of in the future. Live and learn.

Luis still has a nice command of shadow and light here, though the renderings are rougher than what his final work would end up looking like by the time chapter 4 finished off.